Anti-semitism In High Gear -- The Other Legacy Of Henry Ford

Books

February 17, 2002|By Reviewed By Mark Pinsky of the Sentinel Staff

As a youngster in the 1950s, I noticed that our family -- like many other Jewish families I knew -- tended to buy General Motors or Chrysler automobiles. When I asked my parents about this, they said, "Jews don't buy Fords."

The reason, as Neil Baldwin explains in his highly readable book, is that Henry Ford was one of America's most notorious anti-Semites. His weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was established in large part to advance his obsession, putting articles on the subject on the front page of 91 straight issues, in a series titled "The International Jew: The World's Problem." The articles, Baldwin writes, "fit squarely into a thousand-year-old continuum of Jew hatred, thick taproots sunk deep into the archetypal, richly poisoned soil of medievalism."

Later, Ford circulated hundreds of thousands of copies of the articles in four paperback volumes, doing incalculable damage here and abroad. "It was as if Ford had tossed a stone into the middle of a pool, and ripples were still emanating outward."

Equally pernicious was his support for a document called "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," generally believed to be a fabrication by Imperial Russia's secret police around the turn of the last century. The spurious pamphlet reinforced the auto magnate's crack-brained notion that a Jewish cabal -- composed of arch-capitalists and arch-communists, financiers and rabbis -- was conspiring to rule the world.

Ford's unique American contribution to this calumny was to add responsibility to the Jews for such "evils" as labor unions, the nation's "Negro problem," agricultural cooperatives, the Federal Reserve system and the nascent women's rights movement. Oh, and world war and inefficiency in the U.S. Navy.

In many ways, Ford was a creation of his times. Young Henry was exposed to standard American anti-Semitism in the late 19th century, beginning with McGuffey's Readers.

"There is no anecdotal evidence that Henry Ford might even have met a Jew before he was 20 years old," writes Baldwin, director of the National Book Foundation. "Prejudice does not depend upon actual experience for its power. Anti-Semitism does not require the presence of Jews, only their images -- as in the powerful image of the profit-motivated Jew."

Ultimately, Ford was forced to formally renounce his anti-Semitism and the Protocols. But it was only when he was faced with a rising wave of negative publicity, lawsuits, declining sales for the signature Model T (in the face of competition from GM) and plans to launch its successor, the Model A. The apology, issued June 30, 1927, was completely disingenuous, an abject statement written by Jewish leader Louis Marshall, head of the American Jewish Committee, that Ford signed without reading.

By the 1930s, the curmudgeon was at it again, providing financial and moral support for Detroit's Father Charles E. Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith, both notorious anti-Semites who developed large radio audiences as World War II approached. Coughlin resurrected the Protocols, serializing them in his journal and reprinted anti-Semitic remarks by Ford, which whom he regularly had lunch.

While laughable today, Ford's anti-Semitism, in print and in public statements, was translated into German in the 1920s and incorporated by Hitler and his Nazi cohorts, who later awarded Ford a gold medal, complete with swastika adornments. Above Hitler's desk in Munich was a portrait of Ford. Later, Baldwin writes, Ford's German subsidiary built many of the trucks and passenger cars for the Wermacht, the SS and police, as well as manufacturing turbines for the deadly V-2 rockets. In a page out of Catch-22, Ford was at the same time building trucks and bombers for the Allies.

"It is one of the cruel ironies of history," wrote the famed journalist Carey McWilliams, "that the savage anti-Semitism which developed in Germany after the First World War should have been stimulated in part by an American industrialist who, in a number of respects, was so typical a product of American culture."

Baldwin raises the question, recurring through history, that often surfaces with regard to issues like racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny. How, in one area of life, can someone be a lauded and far-sighted genius, doing good and creating wonders, while at the same time, in another, be a reviled and short-sighted bigot, doing evil and causing great pain?

Genius, artistic as well industrial, carries with it a certain level of license, as unfair as that may be. Think Thomas Wolfe, Benvenuto Cellini, Pablo Picasso. As E.G. Pipp, an early Ford associate and later a longtime adversary noted, "Henry Ford got into trouble when he meandered outside his rightful intellectual territory."